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A writer of the stature of Roger Zelazny could not write a ten book series without many flashes of inspiration. Inspiration is certainly present in the Amber series, but it is thinly spread, amongst long stretches of lazy, underpowered writing. These rather irritating books strike me as fantasy for people who don't really like fantasy. They have none of the mad pulp exuberance of true genre fantasy, such as Moorcock's.
Zelazny was always inclined to adopt a laconic, smart-alecky tone, and that is the predominant note here. Combined with the literary allusions, one gets the sense of a bookish aesthete trying to write like a tough guy, and failing.
For a writer who was, at his best, one of the true poets of science fiction, Zelazny could write absolutely wretched stuff. The prose of 'The Changing Land', for example, would have shamed Lin Carter - that it was written by the same man who, within a year, would publish the remarkable Navajo prose-poem 'Eye of Cat' is scarcely believable. The Amber books are by no means as awful as that, but their success strikes me as unfortunate for Zelazny's later career (if not his bank balance).
Zelazny was always inclined to adopt a laconic, smart-alecky tone, and that is the predominant note here. Combined with the literary allusions, one gets the sense of a bookish aesthete trying to write like a tough guy, and failing.
For a writer who was, at his best, one of the true poets of science fiction, Zelazny could write absolutely wretched stuff. The prose of 'The Changing Land', for example, would have shamed Lin Carter - that it was written by the same man who, within a year, would publish the remarkable Navajo prose-poem 'Eye of Cat' is scarcely believable. The Amber books are by no means as awful as that, but their success strikes me as unfortunate for Zelazny's later career (if not his bank balance).
